Web Video Creation and Optimization Forum

YouTube, the largest video-sharing website, will show full-length television shows and films from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's archives in its latest step to boost advertising revenue by adding professional programing, the company told Reuters on Sunday.

Many TV networks already run short clips on YouTube, which also offers millions of home videos uploaded by users.

But until now, YouTube videos were predominantly short clips of ten minutes or less. The company has been experimenting with full-length shows for some months with Time Warner Inc's HBO and CBS's Showtime cable networks.

Back when this was announced I was surprised to see that they were running a favorite of mine, Master and Commander, which is a superb feature film, directed by Peter Weir, with an excellent performance by Russell Crowe.

I watched part of it, and, while it was nice to be reminded of the film, I decided that if I were going to invest the over two-hours it would take to re-see the whole thing, I'd much rather see it on DVD or at a showing in a repertory theatre.

As a PS to this... more recently YouTube has made some videos available in high-quality, wide-screen format. Depending on the source and the encoding, the quality of these can sometimes very good. I haven't checked the features since YouTube has switched to higher quality, but higher quality on the feature films might be a temptation, for some movies at least, depending on where and how often the commercials were inserted and the kind of film it was.